I love the Dallas of the late 60s and early 70s, before any of the "new" stuff was built that decade. Everything constructed in the 50s was starting to show its age and things just had a weathered/gritty look overall. First time that people talked about redeveloping downtown, in a modern sense, from what I gather.

What is also great about that is you can see how much more open the building looked from the pedestrian level when it was a department store with the glass storefronts wrapped around the ground level with the beautiful mural above. DART really destroyed the beauty of the building in their conversion to an office building. Time will tell if some of that beauty can be restored once DART finally moves out to a better space for them. It won't be a department store again but it could be a cool building with a mixture of restoration and new use changes.

Tnexster wrote:Those are fun, I wish I could walk into one of those videos and just take a look around.

Oh how I wish...

That definitely would be an experience to see Dallas as such a vibrant and lively city. Although, I feel like in a decade or so, Dallas will be just as (or even more) lively than before. One cool way of looking at it, is that this might be one of the rare times where we all get to experience parts of Dallas while they are still a bit deserted.

I remember going to Deep Ellum on a Saturday night a couple years ago and the street was empty, and there were only a handful of people in some of the bars, and I also remember going to the Farmer's Market Food Hall when it just opened and it was also very barren at the time. I guess it's not really a good thing that parts of our city are so dead, but, it's kinda cool to think that 20 years from most of these sights will be jam-packed full of people but we can all remember a time when that definitely was not the case.

Going through all these videos, I'm still seeing all the surface lots that exist today (check out 0:20s on that last link). It looks like all the pedestrian activity and vibrancy was concentrated on EMC & Pacific.

One thing in this video that I can't figure out is seeing the "Copper Cow" restaurant on Commerce. The video is labeled March 1974 but according to at least two stories in D Magazine, that building burned down in 1960.

Sure would be nice if the city allowed normal signage again. "Cleaning up" the appearance of downtown street, decluttering and whatever sure seemed to make sense a couple decades ago, just like cutting into the sidewalks for additional traffic lanes.

I suppose for a generation or two, initiatives like that had some positive impact; mimicking the clean and safe suburban environment was the goal for many downtowns. Now it simply diminished excitement.

tamtagon wrote:Sure would be nice if the city allowed normal signage again. "Cleaning up" the appearance of downtown street, decluttering and whatever sure seemed to make sense a couple decades ago, just like cutting into the sidewalks for additional traffic lanes.

I suppose for a generation or two, initiatives like that had some positive impact; mimicking the clean and safe suburban environment was the goal for many downtowns. Now it simply diminished excitement.

So, that’s what happened to all the signage. To me signage, (when appropriate) makes a downtown seem more lively.

One of the blade signs that stood out for me in that footage was the one for Piccadilly Cafeteria. In 1964 this was the site of a protest that lasted 28 days over the restaurant's refusal to desegregate its counter.

I found out that it was located at 1503 Commerce St, opened in 1955 and closed in 1977. The building was home to a Scholtzky's at one point and was still standing in 2008. It was purchased by Headington and torn down for the first Joule expansion.

Piccadilly Casfeteria.png

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lakewoodhobo wrote:One of the blade signs that stood out Piccadilly Casfeteria.png

I love signs like that, Downtown absolutely needs re-regulation so business can announce themselves like this. Call it a wayfinder if that's the kind of lingo decision makers have become conditioned to recognize. Whatever.

I never knew Piccadilly was in Dallas/North Texas, not surprised by the Old South Segregationist hold-out.... I think there's still a few in The ATL, but it's been years since I've eaten at a place like that.

Just came on here to post the link too! This footage is incredible and at the same time really, really depressing. Tragic how such a vibrant city was just picked apart over decades and is only now starting to show any glimpses of what's in this video.

Yeah, Downtown was a vibrant center back in those days. And it actually looked like a real city with real pedestrian activity and connectivity. No matter how developers try to rebuild, we will never be able to achieve the quality of that era.

joshua.dodd wrote:Yeah, Downtown was a vibrant center back in those days. And it actually looked like a real city with real pedestrian activity and connectivity. No matter how developers try to rebuild, we will never be able to achieve the quality of that era.

I think we can rebuild that if we actually followed the Forward Dallas plan and reintroduced an intra-urban streetcar network like this city was designed for (and maybe getting rid of highway 345 and shielding the other highways more). It's not that hard, but the city would have to stop kowtowing to big developers and their parking garages and we have seen that the city leader's personal pocketbooks are not willing to do that.

I love looking at this footage. I wonder if the downtown activity was concentrated mainly at EMC. I'd love to see what West End, Farmers Market, Pacific, and Ross Ave looked like. I did notice some of the same surface lots we have today (Main/Griffin, Commerce/Harwood, behind City Hall). While the older downtown looks cool, I still think we have a chance to build a better downtown. I'm glad we have more parks, more residential, and we have a chance to get better retail. From the footage I see a lot of cool shops, but also jewelers, discount centers, and loan centers.

^People have been conditioned to question small, independent retailers as possibly unreliable, lower quality, lower value for the money and favor corporate retail as stable, reliable and quality driven. Maybe it's ironic, independent retailers don't survive gentrification in part because they are associated with undesirability and inability to meet certain standards by new neighborhood residents craving the familiar, the brands they know will meet expectations; these expectations are the result of conditioning rather choice.

As it appears to be now, the basis of a thriving downtown have returned to Dallas. Well defined areas of intense street activity with buffered around and between areas of passive areas.

mdg109 wrote:I love looking at this footage. I wonder if the downtown activity was concentrated mainly at EMC. I'd love to see what West End, Farmers Market, Pacific, and Ross Ave looked like. I did notice some of the same surface lots we have today (Main/Griffin, Commerce/Harwood, behind City Hall). While the older downtown looks cool, I still think we have a chance to build a better downtown. I'm glad we have more parks, more residential, and we have a chance to get better retail. From the footage I see a lot of cool shops, but also jewelers, discount centers, and loan centers.

I've thought about this too. From early 1970s photos I've seen of Pacific Ave (the back side of the theaters in Theater Row) it was pretty barren, so I imagine everything north of here save for Republic Center, Medical Arts and Southland Center was parking lots and warehouses until you reached the churches and car dealerships on the pre-Arts District north side of downtown... not exactly a paradise of pedestrian activity. And south of Jackson St, since most of it was bulldozed for Main Center and Griffin Square, all you had was the cemetery and Memorial Auditorium so it's safe to assume that what people called downtown at the time was Elm-Main-Commerce.

Side note: Spaghetti Warehouse was the first restaurant to open in the West End in 1972, so it was probably only the county buildings there, plus the "new" Kennedy Memorial, at the time of this film.

I remember those mall proposals. One was adjacent to the Crescent, one was across the street from BOA Center, and the other, my favorite because of all the towers it brought, was between Akard and St. Paul at Ross. The hope was that a Downtown mall would do for Dallas what Horton Plaza did for Downtown San Diego.